When North and South went to war, millions of American families endured their first long separation. For men in the armies-and their wives, children, parents, and siblings at home-letter writing was the sole means to communicate. Yet for many of these Union and Confederate families, taking pen to paper was a new and daunting task. I Remain Yours narrates the Civil War from the perspective of ordinary people who had to figure out how to salve the emotional strain of war and sustain their closest relationships using only the written word. Christopher Hager presents an intimate history of the Civil War through the interlaced stories of common soldiers and their families. The previously overlooked words of a carpenter from Indiana, an illiterate teenager from Connecticut, a grieving mother in the mountains of North Carolina, and a blacksmith's daughter on the Iowa prairie reveal through their awkward script and expression the personal toll of war. Is my son alive or dead? Returning soon or never? Can I find words for the horrors I've seen or the loneliness I feel? Fear, loss, and upheaval stalked the lives of Americans straining to connect the battlefront to those they left behind. Hager shows how relatively uneducated men and women made this new means of communication their own, turning writing into an essential medium for sustaining relationships and a sense of belonging. Letter writing changed them and they in turn transformed the culture of letters into a popular, democratic mode of communication.

Often neglected, except for specific battles in the region, the Civil War in Missouri and Kansas had a profound influence in the course of the war; not to mention the effects on the towns and people in that region. The attempt here is to bring to life the experiences of the soldiers, civilians and officers of both sides. Outside of Virginia and Tennessee, Missouri was the third most fought over ground in the American Civil War. The story brings to life the influences and events in Missouri that contributed to the outbreak of the internecine strife. The war in Missouri culminates with a military expedition that re-wrote the book of military tactics and the application of how to use and not use Mounted Infantry. It is important not to see history through rose colored glasses, but from a time very different from our own. Let it be your guide.

In January 1863, a long-anticipated military order arrived on the desk of Massachusetts Governor John Andrew. President Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, had granted the governor authority to raise regiments of black soldiers. Two units-the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Infantry-were soon mustered and Andrew was eager to recruit a black cavalry regiment. In December, he issued General Order No. 44, announcing ""a Regiment of Cavalry Volunteers, to be composed of men of color...is now in the process of recruitment in the Commonwealth."" Drawing on letters, diaries, memoirs and official reports, this book provides the first full-length regimental history of the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, chronicling the unit's organization, participation in the Petersburg campaign, guarding of prisoners at Point Lookout, Maryland, and its triumphant ride into Richmond. The postwar lives and contributions of many of the men are included.

New Bedford's Civil War examines the social, political, economic, and military history of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the nineteenth century, with a focus on the Civil War homefront from 1861 to 1865 and on the city's black community, soldiers, and veterans.
Earl Mulderink's engaging work contributes to the growing body of Civil War studies that analyzes the "war at home" by focusing on the bustling center of the world's whaling industry in the nineteenth century. Using a broad chronological framework of the 1840s through the 1890s, this book contextualizes the rise and fall of New Bedford's whaling enterprise and details the war's multifaceted impacts between 1861 and 1865. A major goal of this book is to explore the war's social history by examining how the conflict touched the city's residents--both white and black.
Known before the war for both its wealth and its antislavery fervor, New Bedford offered a congenial home for a sizeable black community that experienced a "different Civil War" than did native-born whites. Drawing upon military pension files, published accounts, and welfare records, this book pays particular attention to soldiers and families connected with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the "brave black regiment" (made famous by the Academy Award-winning 1989 film Glory) that helped shape national debates over black military enlistment, equal pay, and notions of citizenship. New Bedford's enlightened white leaders, many of them wealthy whaling merchants with Quaker roots, actively promoted military enlistment that pulled 2,000 local citizen-soldiers (about 10 percent of the city's total population) into the Union ranks.
As the Whaling City gave way to a postwar landscape marked by textile manufacturing and heavy foreign immigration, the black community fought to keep alive the meaning and history of the Civil War. Joining their one-time neighbor Frederick Douglass, New Bedford's black veterans used the memory of the war and their participation in it to push for full equality--a losing battle by the turn of the twentieth century.

In 2002, Judy Cook discovered a packet of letters written by her great-great-grandparents, Gilbert and Esther Claflin, during the American Civil War. An unexpected bounty, these letters from 1862-63 offer visceral witness to the war, recounting the trials of a family separated. Gilbert, an articulate and cheerful forty-year-old farmer, was drafted into the Union Army and served in the Thirty-Fourth Wisconsin Infantry garrisoned in western Kentucky along the Mississippi. Esther had married Gilbert when she was fifteen; now a woman with two teenage sons, she ran the family farm near Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in Gilbert's absence. In his letters, Gilbert writes about food, hygiene, rampant desertions by drafted men, rebel guerrilla raids, and pastimes in the daily life of a soldier. His comments on interactions with Confederate prisoners and ex-slaves before and after the Emancipation Proclamation reveal his personal views on monumental events. Esther shares in her letters the challenges and joys of maintaining the farm, accounts of their boys Elton and Price, concerns about finances and health, and news of their local community and extended family. Esther's experiences provide insight into family, farm, and village life in the wartime North, an often overlooked aspect of Civil War history. Judy Cook has made the letters accessible to a wider audience by providing historical context with notes and appendixes. The volume includes a foreword by Civil War historian Keith S. Bohannon.

Highlighting recent and new directions in contemporary research in the field, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a complete and updated picture of intellectual life in the Civil War-era Union. Compiling essays from both established and young historians, this volume addresses the role intellectuals played in framing the conflict and implementing their vision of a victorious Union. Broadly defining "intellectuals" to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders, the essays address how these thinkers disseminated their ideas, sometimes using commercial or popular venues and organizations to implement what they believed. Offering a vast range of perspectives on how northerners thought about,experienced, and responded to the Civil War, So Conceived and So Dedicated is organized around three questions: To what extent did educated Americans believe that the Civil War exposed the failure of old ideas? Did the Civil War promote new strains of authoritarianism in northern intellectual life or did the war reinforce democratic individualism? How did the Civil War affect northerners' conception of nationalism and their understanding of their relationship to the state? Essays explore myriad topics, including: how antebellum ideas about the environment and the body influenced conceptions of democratic health; how leaders of the Irish American community reconciled their support of the United States and the Republican Party with their allegiances to Ireland and their fellow Irish immigrants; how intellectual leaders of the northern African American community explained secession, civil war, and emancipation; the influence of southern ideals on northern intellectuals; wartime and postwar views from college and university campuses; the ideological acrobatics that professors at midwestern universities had to perform in order to keep their students from leaving the classroom; and how northern sketch artists helped influence the changing perceptions of African American soldiers over the course of the war. Collectively, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers relevant and fruitful answers to the nation's intellectual history and suggests that antebellum modes of thinking remained vital and tenacious well after the Civil War.

Unmatched in its description of the battle's tactics and actual fighting.--Ethan Rafuse, author of McClellan's WarOn July 21, 1861, near a Virginia railroad junction twenty-five miles from Washington, DC, the Union and Confederate armies clashed in the first major battle of the Civil War. This revised edition of Hennessy's classic is the premier tactical account of First Manassas/Bull Run.- Combines narrative, analysis, and interpretation into a clear, easy-to-follow account of the battle's unfolding- Features commanders who would later become legendary, such as William T. Sherman and Thomas J. Jackson, who earned his "Stonewall" nickname at First Manassas

During the American Civil War, the mounted soldiers fighting on both sides of the conflict carried a wide array of weapons, from sabers and lances to carbines, revolvers, and other firearms. Though some sections of the cavalry placed their trust in the sabre, the advent of viable breechloading carbines -- especially repeaters such as the Spencer -- was to transform warfare within little more than a decade of General Lee's final surrender at Appomattox. However, output struggled to keep up with unprecedented demands on manufacturing technology and distribution in areas where communication was difficult and in states whose primary aim was to equip their own men rather than contribute to the arming of Federal or Confederate regiments. In addition, the almost unparalleled losses of men and equipment ensured that almost any firearm, effectual or not, was pressed into service. Consequently, the sheer variety of weaponry carried reflected the mounted soldiers' various roles in different theatres of operation, but also the availability -- or otherwise -- of weapons, notably on the Confederate side. Fully illustrated, this study assesses the effectiveness of the many different weapons arming the Civil War cavalryman and analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the decisions made after 1865 concerning the armament of the US cavalry.

In the 'Battle in America' series well-known historical illustrator Peter Dennis breathes life back into the 19th century paper soldier, supplying all the artwork needed to create the armies which fought for and against the Union across the United States. Here the blue and the grey regiments can clash again, using simple rules from Veteran wargamer Andy Callan. Although the figures can be used with any of the commercial sets of wargame rules, an introduction to wargaming and a simple set of rules by veteran wargamer Andy Callan is included, along with buildings, trees and even artillery along with daring rebel cavalry and colourful Zouaves.

The 11th North Carolina Infantry in the Civil War is the unforgettable story of civilian-soldiers and their families during the American Civil War. This narrative follows a regiment of Carolinians from their mustering-in ceremony in 1861, to the war's final moments of surrender at Appomattox. A multitude of Tar Heels tell their stories through the use of over 1,500 quotes, enabling us to hear what they saw, experienced, and felt. The 11th North Carolina Infantry in the Civil War tracks these Carolinians and follows them as they changed from exhilarated volunteers to battle-hardened veterans. They eagerly rushed to join the Bethel Regiment with exuberance for battle, summed up by their colonel, who shouted at the Yankees, "You dogs, you missed me!" Later, once the grim realities set in, the Tar Heels stood solidly beside their comrades. One rifleman expressed this shared sentiment, writing; "Open ground and enemy works, it made the men quiet, but they did not flinch." Eventually though, as the war took its horrible toll, a weary veteran wrote, "I wonder--when and if I return home--will I be able to fit in?" The 11th North Carolina Infantry in the Civil War is an intensely personal account based upon the Carolinians' letters, journals, memoirs, official reports, personnel records, and family histories. It is a powerful account of courage and sacrifice.

"[Kaplan] tells this story with precision and eloquence." -Seattle Times"An eye-opening biography from a trusted source on the topic." -Kirkus Review"Elegantly written and thoroughly researched." -Publishers WeeklyThe acclaimed biographer, with a thought-provoking exploration of how Abraham Lincoln's and John Quincy Adams' experiences with slavery and race shaped their differing viewpoints, provides both perceptive insights into these two great presidents and a revealing perspective on race relations in modern America.Lincoln, who in afterlife became mythologized as the Great Emancipator, was shaped by the values of the white America into which he was born. While he viewed slavery as a moral crime abhorrent to American principles, he disapproved of anti-slavery activists. Until the last year of his life, he advocated "voluntary deportation," concerned that free blacks in a white society would result in centuries of conflict. In 1861, he had reluctantly taken the nation to war to save it. While this devastating struggle would preserve the Union, it would also abolish slavery-creating the biracial democracy Lincoln feared. John Quincy Adams, forty years earlier, was convinced that only a civil war would end slavery and preserve the Union. An antislavery activist, he had concluded that a multiracial America was inevitable. Lincoln and the Abolitionists, a frank look at Lincoln, "warts and all," provides an in-depth look at how these two presidents came to see the issues of slavery and race, and how that understanding shaped their perspectives. In a far-reaching historical narrative, Fred Kaplan offers a nuanced appreciation of both these great men and the events that have characterized race relations in America for more than a century-a legacy that continues to haunt us all. The book has a colorful supporting cast from the relatively obscure Dorcas Allen, Moses Parsons, Violet Parsons, Theophilus Parsons, Phoebe Adams, John King, Charles Fenton Mercer, Phillip Doddridge, David Walker, Usher F. Linder, and H. Ford Douglas to Elijah Lovejoy, Francis Scott Key, William Channing, Wendell Phillips, and Rufus King. The cast includes Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's first vice president, and James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, the two presidents on either side of Lincoln. And it includes Abigail Adams, John Adams, Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and Frederick Douglass, who hold honored places in the American historical memory.The subject of this book is slavery and racism, the paradox of Lincoln, our greatest president, as an antislavery moralist who believed in an exclusively white America; and Adams, our most brilliant statesman, as an antislavery activist who had no doubt that the United States would become a multiracial nation. It is as much about the present as the past.

In this comprehensive examination of British sympathy for the South during and after the American Civil War, Michael J. Turner explores the ideas and activities of A.J. Beresford Hope - one of the leaders of the pro-Confederate lobby in Britain - to provide fresh insight into that seemingly curious allegiance. Hope and his associates cast famed Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson as the embodiment of southern independence, courage, and honour, elevating him to the status of a hero in Britain. Historians have often noted that economic interest, political attitudes, and concern about Britain's global reach and geostrategic position led many in the country to embrace the Confederate cause, but they have focused less on the social, cultural, and religious reasons enunciated by Hope and ostensibly represented by Jackson, factors Turner suggests also heightened British affinity for the South. During the war, Hope noticed a tendency among British people to view southerners as heroic warriors in their struggle against the North. He and his pro-southern followers shared and promoted this vision, framing Jackson as the personification of that noble mission and raising the general's profile in Britain so high that they collected enough funds to construct a memorial to him after his death in 1863. Unveiled twelve years later in Richmond, Virginia, the statue stands today as a remarkable artifact of one of the lesser-known strands of British pro-Confederate ideology. Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain serves as the first in-depth analysis of Hope as a leading pro-southern activist and of Jackson's reputation in Britain during and after the Civil War. It places the conflict in a transnational context that reveals the reasons British citizens formed bonds of solidarity with the southerners whom they perceived shared their social and cultural values.

Union Major General Gouverneur Warren participated in almost every major battle in the Civil War's Eastern Theater, from Big Bethel to Five Forks. He was held in such high esteem that he was often looked upon as the Union general most responsible for the victory at Gettysburg, and was considered the logical replacement for George Gordon Meade as commanding general of the Army of the Potomac. However, within days of the war's end he was relieved in disgrace on the battlefield by General Phil Sheridan. Warren spent the next fifteen years seeking the activation of a Court of Inquiry that he believed would vindicate his conduct. This book is the story of that court.

At the outset of the American Civil War, the Union Army's sharpshooters were initially equipped with the M1855 Colt revolving rifle, but it was prone to malfunction. Instead, the North's sharpshooters preferred the Sharps rifle, an innovative breech-loading weapon capable of firing up to ten shots per minute - more than three times the rate of fire offered by the standard-issue Springfield .58-caliber rifled musket. Other Union sharpshooters were equipped with the standard-issue Springfield rifled musket or the .56-56-caliber Spencer Repeating Rifle. Conversely, the Confederacy favoured the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifled musket for its sharpshooters and also imported from Britain the Whitworth Rifle, a .45-caliber, single-shot, muzzle-loading weapon distinguished by its use of a twisted hexagonal barrel. Featuring specially commissioned artwork, this is the engrossing story of the innovative rifles that saw combat in the hands of sharpshooters on both sides during the Civil War.

Conventional wisdom tells us that marriage was illegal for African Americans during the antebellum era, and that if people married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is an impression that imbues beliefs about black families to this day. But it's a perception primarily based on documents produced by abolitionists, the state, or other partisans. It doesn't tell the whole story.
Drawing on a trove of less well-known sources including family histories, folk stories, memoirs, sermons, and especially the fascinating writings from the Afro-Protestant Press, 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part offers a radically different perspective on antebellum love and family life.
Frances Smith Foster applies the knowledge she's developed over a lifetime of reading and thinking. Advocating both the potency of skepticism and the importance of story-telling, her book shows the way toward a more genuine, more affirmative understanding of African American romance, both then and now.

In 1864, General Sterling Price with an army of 12,000 ragtag Confederates invaded Missouri in an effort to wrest it from the United States Army's Department of Missouri. Price hoped his campaign would sway the 1864 presidential election, convincing war-weary Northern voters to cast their ballots for a peace candidate rather than Abraham Lincoln. It was the South's last invasion of Northern territory. But it was simply too late in the war for the South to achieve such an outcome, and Price grossly mismanaged the campaign, guaranteeing defeat of his force and the Confederate States. This book chronicles the Confederacy's desperate final and ill-fated attempt win a decisive victory.

The first full investigation of John Brown's trusted co-conspirator and his betrayal of the doomed Harper's Ferry raiders John Brown's Spy tells the nearly unknown story of John E. Cook, the person John Brown trusted most with the details of his plans to capture the Harper's Ferry armory in 1859. Cook was a poet, a marksman, a boaster, a dandy, a fighter, and a womanizer-as well as a spy. In a life of only thirty years, he studied law in Connecticut, fought border ruffians in Kansas, served as an abolitionist mole in Virginia, took white hostages during the Harper's Ferry raid, and almost escaped to freedom. For ten days after the infamous raid, he was the most hunted man in America with a staggering $1,000 bounty on his head. Tracking down the unexplored circumstances of John Cook's life and disastrous end, Steven Lubet is the first to uncover the full extent of Cook's contributions to Brown's scheme. Without Cook's participation, the author contends, Brown might never have been able to launch the insurrection that sparked the Civil War. Had Cook remained true to the cause, history would have remembered him as a hero. Instead, when Cook was captured and brought to trial, he betrayed John Brown and named fellow abolitionists in a full confession that earned him a place in history's tragic pantheon of disgraced turncoats.

In DIXIE BETRAYED, David Eicher reveals for the first time the story of the political conspiracy, discord and dysfunction in Richmond that cost the South the Civil War. Drawing on a wide variety of previously unexploited sources, Eicher shows how President Jefferson Davis fought not only with the Confederate House and Senate and with State Governers but also with his own vice-president and secretary of state. He interfered with his generals in the field, micro-managing their campaigns and playing favourites, ignoring the chain of command. He trusted a number of men who were utterly incompetent. Secession didn't end with the breakaway of the Confederacy and Davis' election as president; some states, led by their governors, debated setting themselves up as separate nations, further undermining efforts to conduct a unified war effort. Sure to be one of the most provocative and controversial books about the Civil War to be published in decades, DIXIE BETRAYED blasts away previous theories with the force of a cannonball and the grace of a gentleman.

Leading politicians, diplomats, clerics, planters, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants preached a transformative, world-historical role for the Confederacy, persuading many of their compatriots to fight not merely to retain what they had but to gain their future empire. Impervious to reality, their vision of future world leadership-territorial, economic, political, and cultural-provided a vitally important, underappreciated motivation to form an independent Confederate republic.In Colossal Ambitions, Adrian Brettle explores how leading Confederate thinkers envisioned their postwar nation-its relationship with the United States, its place in the Americas, and its role in the global order. Brettle draws on rich caches of published and unpublished letters and diaries, Confederate national and state government documents, newspapers published in North America and England, conference proceedings, pamphlets, contemporary and scholarly articles, and more to engage the perspectives not only of modern historians but some of the most salient theorists of the Western World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An impressive and complex undertaking, Colossal Ambitions concludes that while some Confederate commentators saw wartime industrialization as pointing towards a different economic future, most Confederates saw their society as revolving once more around coercive labor, staple crop production, and exports in the war's wake.

The Civil War Dead and American Modernity offers a fundamental rethinking of the cultural importance of the American Civil War dead. Tracing their representational afterlife across a massive array of historical, visual, and literary documents from 1861 to 1914, Ian Finseth maintains that the war dead played a central, complex, and paradoxical role in how Americans experienced and understood the modernization of the United States. From eyewitness accounts of battle to photographs and paintings, and from full-dress histories of the war to fictional narratives, Finseth shows that the dead circulated through American cultural life in ways that we have not fully appreciated, and that require an expanded range of interpretive strategies to understand. While individuals grieved and relinquished their own loved ones, the collective Civil War dead, Finseth argues, came to form a kind of symbolic currency that informed Americans' melancholic relationship to their own past. Amid the turbulence of the postbellum era, as the United States embarked decisively upon its technological, geopolitical, and intellectual modernity, the dead provided an illusion of coherence, intelligibility, and continuity in the national self. At the same time, they seemed to represent a traumatic break in history and the loss of a simpler world, and their meanings could never be completely contained by the political discourse that surrounded them. Reconstructing the formal, rhetorical, and ideological strategies by which postwar American society reimagined, and continues to reimagine, the Civil War dead, Finseth also shows that a strain of critical thought was alert to this dynamic from the very years of the war itself. The Civil War Dead and American Modernity is at once a study of the politics of mortality, the disintegration of American Victorianism, and the role of visual and literary art in both forming and undermining social consensus.

This historical account covers the 25th Regiment North Carolina Infantry Troops during the Civil War. Farmers and farmers' sons left their mountain homesteads to enlist with the regiment at Asheville in July and August 1861 and to defend their homeland from a Yankee invasion. The book chronicles the unit's defensive activities in the Carolina coastal regions and the battlefield actions at Seven Days, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Plymouth, Richmond and Petersburg. In addition, casualty and desertion statistics are included, along with a complete regimental roster and 118 photos, illustrations, and maps.

This is the first biography of Union General William S. Rosecrans in more than fifty years. It tells the story of his military successes and the important results that led to the Union victory in the Civil War: winning the first major campaign of the war in West Virginia in 1861; victories in northeastern Mississippi that made the Vicksburg Campaign possible; gaining the victory without which Abraham Lincoln said the ""nation could scarcely have lived over""; conducting two brilliant campaigns in Tennessee and fighting the battle of Chickamauga (giving permanent possession of Chattanooga to the federals); defending Missouri from an invasion in 1864. The book also attempts to explain why Rosecrans was removed four times despite his military successes and examines the important part politics played in the war. Additionally it reveals a man who promoted many advances in medical care, transportation and cartography; a man interested in engineering as well as theology.

When O'Neill first moved to Alabama, as a white Northerner, he felt somewhat removed from the racism Confederate monuments represented. Then one day in Selma, he stumbled across a group of citizens protecting a monument to Forrest, the officer who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and whom William Tecumseh Sherman referred to as "that devil." O'Neill sets off to visit other disputed memorials to Forrest across the South, talking with men and women who believe they are protecting their heritage, and those who have a different view of the man's poisonous history. O'Neill's reporting and thoughtful, deeply personal analysis make it clear that white supremacy is not a regional affliction but is in fact coded into the DNA of the entire country. Down Along with That Devil's Bones presents an important and eye-opening account of how we got from Appomattox to Charlottesville, and where, if we can truly understand and transcend our past, we could be headed next.